DAYS OF POVERTY

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LXII, Issue 18900, 30 December 1935, Page 13

DAYS OF POVERTY

MR. HUGHES AS YOUTH FAILURE AS PANTRYMAN SYDNEY, Dec. 10. Mi- w. M. Hughes, 'M.P., in an address hist night at a concert given t <> the single unemployed men at Hammond’s hotel, Buck land street, recalled some of his struggles as a young man. Mr Hughes spoke of the days when he*and others in the Labor movement were fighting for the “under-dog. The “under-dog,” lie added, wanted, champions, and lie had never wanted them more than to-day. Mr Hughes took his audience back to Die days when he travelled sheep for a living across Queensland into New South Wales, and to the period, on his arrival in Sydney, with only a. shilling or two in his pocket, when lie applied for a job as a pantryman; tit an eating-house. lie said that at least he knew what a pantry was, and, putting himself forward as a pantryman, he got the job at P's a week. In taking the cups into the dining-room he dropped ail of them except two. Ho was told to go tit the end of the week. “That’s how I began,” added Mr Hughes, amid laughter. “There was another place in this neighborhood that advertised for a plain cook. Well, I was plain enough—-(laughter) —and 1 applied for the job. I got it. But I regret to say that it ended in the same disastrous way as the other one. I am. reciting these tilings just to let you see that, while you may bo hard up, there have been others even more hard up.” Mr Hughes recalled also the occasion when lie recognised, from it -platform on the Domain, a man alongside whom he had slept in a cave there. Mr Hughes claimed to lie a living example of what could he done in fightingadversity. “I need not dwell upon my physique,” he said, “but, if .1 hud the face and the physique of the.young ladies on the platform to-night 1 would regard myself as queen of the earth.” ( Laughter).